An “extremely loved little girl” has died leaving a community devastated. Porsha Williams, three, from a traveller family in Merthyr Tydfil, died following 17 gruelling months at Noah’s Ark Hospital in Cardiff where grandmother Lynda Keefe said she “hasn’t once complained and has fought like you wouldn't believe”.
Porsha was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia in September 2021 and has spent every day at the hospital since while mum Chloe and father Jamie have lived in the Ronald McDonald house next door. She had her last chemotherapy treatment in November 2021 and had been in remission since that but following a bone marrow transplant in January 2022 she was diagnosed with graft versus host disease where white blood cells in the donated bone marrow attack other cells in the body.
It is caused when donated cells – referred to as the graft – see the body’s cells as foreign. Many cases of the disease can be treated successfully according to medical experts but some can cause severe and possibly fatal damage to the organs. Porsha’s family were told late last year that the damage caused to her lungs was fatal.
